Friday, August 27, 2010

Good Thing or Bad?

Given the cost of this procedure and the projections for when Medicare will go bust, young folks might have a legitimate concern that the funds for health care might not be available for such a procedure by the time they're eligible.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Just had a discussion about this with one of our CT surgeons. His elderly mother recently died with severe AS. Her physicians wanted to refer her for percutaneous valve replacement. He declined to persue this and felt that it was not appropriate.That made me a bit more optimistic about the utilization of these devices if/when they get approval. But I guess he could be an outlier. CardioNP

While agree with you, "society" is quickly evolving toward using "guidelines" for medical care as "mandates" for care. I would hope that local, reasoned approach to this issue between a doctor and patient could be maintained in the future, but with third party payers increasingly controlling who gets what, we can look for any number of other covert rationing schemes (also known as hoop-jumping) to be foisted upon doctors and their patients as central cost concerns trump local care concerns.

When you're happy to pay for universal pre-school, school lunches, mental health clinics, drug re-hab, universal pre-natal care, after school programs, dental care for needy children, universal kindergarten, affordable college tuition, and wars that are paid for - maybe just three of them - then I'll be happy to pay for open heart surgery at 101.

About Me

Westby G. Fisher, MD, FACC is a board certified internist, cardiologist, and cardiac electrophysiologist (doctor specializing in heart rhythm disorders) practicing at NorthShore University HealthSystem in Evanston, IL, USA and is a Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at University of Chicago's Pritzker School of Medicine. He entered the blog-o-sphere in November, 2005.
DISCLAIMER: The opinions expressed in this blog are strictly the those of the author(s) and should not be construed as the opinion(s) or policy(ies) of NorthShore University HealthSystem, nor recommendations for your care or anyone else's. Please seek professional guidance instead.